from the and-the-revelations-just-keep-on-coming dept

There have been questions of when (not if) the next "Ed Snowden" situation would show up. There certainly have been a few recent leaks that appear to have been from folks other than Snowden, but they've mostly been one-off leaks. However, this morning, Al Jazeera is claiming that it got its hands on a huge trough of spy documents, in the form of cables from South Africa's spy agency, the State Security Agency (SSA), and it will begin reporting on what's in those documents, in collaboration with reporters at The Guardian:

Spanning a period from 2006 until December 2014, they include detailed briefings and internal analyses written by operatives of South Africa's State Security Agency (SSA). They also reveal the South Africans' secret correspondence with the US intelligence agency, the CIA, Britain's MI6, Israel's Mossad, Russia's FSB and Iran's operatives, as well as dozens of other services from Asia to the Middle East and Africa.

The files unveil details of how, as the post-apartheid South African state grappled with the challenges of forging new security services, the country became vulnerable to foreign espionage and inundated with warnings related to the US "War on Terror".

As Al Jazeera points out, this is not "signals intelligence" (SIGINT) material, but rather "human intelligence" (HUMINT) of the kind normally done by the CIA, rather than the NSA. It's about spies on the ground -- and also, according to Al Jazeera, their humdrum daily office existence. Honestly, it almost sounds like the plot of a bad sitcom: come work at a premier national intelligence agency... and bitch about the lack of parking:

At times, the workplace resembles any other, with spies involved in form-filling, complaints about missing documents and personal squabbles.... One set of cables from the Algerian Embassy in South Africa relates to a more practical concern. It demands that "no parking" signs are placed in the street outside. The cable notes that the British and US embassies enjoy this privilege, and argues that it should be extended to Algeria as well.

Whether or not this latest leak turns up anything more interesting than parking disputes, it is worth noting that another trove of intelligence documents have leaked...

from the watching-you-watching-me dept

If you checked out last week's episode, you know that Barry Eisler is a bestselling author with a lot to say about the publishing industry. What you might not know is that he also used to work for the CIA, and he's got a lot to say about that world as well. This week, Barry is back to talk about the culture and inner workings of the intelligence community.

from the what-violence? dept

As you may recall, in the leadup to the government finally releasing a heavily redacted version of the Senate Intelligence Committee's CIA Torture Report, the state department kept asking for the report not to be released, claiming that they had evidence that the release of the report would cause violence directed at US citizens around the globe. Even Secretary of State John Kerry pleaded with Feinstein not to release the report. We questioned how legitimate these supposed "threats" were, and you may have noticed in the two months since the report was released a severe absence of sudden new attacks that were being blamed on the release of the report.

Feinstein: And I have one other question to ask the Director. Um, Mr. Director, days before the public release of our report on CIA detention and interrogation, we received an intelligence assessment predicting violence throughout the world and significant damage to United States relationships. NCTC participated in that assessment. Do you believe that assessment proved correct?

Rasmussen: I can speak particularly to the threat portion of that rather than the partnership aspect of that because I would say that’s the part NCTC would have the most direct purchase on, and I can’t say that I can disaggregate the level of terrorism and violence we’ve seen in the period since the report was issued, disaggregate that level from what we might have seen otherwise because, as you know, the turmoil roiling in those parts of the world, not that part of the world, those parts of the world, the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, there’s a number of factors that go on creating the difficult threat environment we face.

So the assessment we made at the time as a community was that we would increase or add to the threat picture in those places. I don’t know that looking backwards now, I can say it did by X% or it didn’t by X%. We were also, I think, clear in saying that there’s parts of the impact that we will not know until we have the benefit of time to see how it would play out in different locations around the world.

Feinstein: Oh boy do I disagree with you. But that’s what makes this arena I guess. The fact in my mind was that the threat assessment was not correct.

As Marcy Wheeler notes, later in the hearing, Senator Ron Wyden also got Rasmussen to admit that he hadn't read the rest of the CIA Torture report, but just the unclassified summary.

Of course, it's no real surprise that the "threat assessment" turned out to be complete bunk, like almost everyone predicted. But since this is Washington DC, there's no accountability on issues like this. It's why the intelligence community can spread scary FUD all day long -- because no one ever calls them on the fact that it's bullshit, and there's no accountability at all.

According to the CIA's investigators, Senate staffers accessed documents they weren't supposed to see, apparently by "abusing" the shared network set up explicitly for the Torture Report compilation. What Wheeler spotted -- in a very thorough fisking of the CIA investigative report by Katherine Hawkins of Just Security -- is the attempted criminalization of Google searches.

As Hawkins summarizes, the crime report was based off a flaw in the Google search that CIA’s own contractor had built into the system.

"On February 7, 2014, the CIA’s Acting General Counsel Robert Eatinger (whose name is redacted from the OIG report) filed a crimes report against Senate staff with the Department of Justice. The OIG report found that the crimes report “was unfounded,” in part because Eatinger “had been provided inaccurate information on which the letter was based.” In particular, the OIG wrote:

[T]he crimes report stated that SSCI staffers might have exploited a software vulnerability on RDINet to obtain access to the [Panetta Review documents], in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act … The report was solely based on inaccurate information provided by the two [Office of the General Counsel] attorneys [to the Office of Security].

The OIG report found that there was indeed “a vulnerability” with the Google search tool that the CIA provided to the committee, which was “not configured to enforce access rights or search permissions within RDINet and its holdings” from 2009 to April 2013. But contrary to the CIA lawyer’s memorandum and the crimes report to DOJ, OIG found no evidence that Senate staff had deliberately “exploited” this flaw until CIA personnel “confronted them” with inappropriately accessed documents. Rather, it was SSCI staff who brought the vulnerability to the CIA’s attention. On November 1, 2012, a SSCI staff member alerted CIA staff that the search tool “was indexing the Majority staff work product on a shared drive,” and asked them to make it stop. The CIA did not act on this request for months. Then in 2013, a SSCI staff member requested “a number of detainee videos not provided to the SSCI by the CIA,” based on a spreadsheet that a CIA employee recognized as being from the Panetta Review. After this incident, in April 2013, CIA IT staff finally discovered and repaired the flaw with the Google search tool."

So, the CIA deployed an insecure system, was warned about it, but never bothered to do anything about it until it came across documents the Senate supposedly wasn't allowed to have.

[C]ommittee staff did not “hack” into CIA computers to obtain these documents as has been suggested in the press. The documents were identified using the search tool provided by the CIA to search the documents provided to the committee.

The information made available to me indicates that in the November 2010 timeframe, the non-employee conducted a search that appeared intended to reach into part of the computer system to which the non-employee did not have authorized access. In such a circumstance, the system was designed to bring up on the workstation screen a page that advised the non-employee was not authorized to access that document. This page, however, had the security vulnerability that has since been discovered and remedied. The security vulnerability was that the page also contained a "URL" that indicated where the document was located on the system and if an individual copied the URL and pasted it into the browser's address bar, the individual could gain access to the document, copy it, bring that copy across the firewall, and paste it into a folder on his or her side of the firewall. The information made available to me indicates the non-employee copied the URL, pasted it directly into the browser's bar, and accessed the document.

That's incredibly poor security for a bunch of documents the CIA clearly didn't want the Senate to access. And it wasn't cheap, either. This custom Google search and server set-up was apparently a large portion of the $40 million spent to compile the Torture Report. And let's not forget that this vulnerability was undiscovered for over two years and not immediately patched when it eventually was discovered.

A staffer finding a flaw in a system isn't hacking, no matter how much the CIA wants it to be. But the CFAA allows the government to use the law's most charitable readings when prosecuting "hackers." The CIA finds wrongdoing everywhere but never in its own backyard. Its management, employees and contractors who presided over its illegal torture program will not be held accountable for their actions. But the CIA wanted the Senate to be held accountable for… holding the CIA accountable.

Hawkins again:

I know some of the staffers who wrote the torture report, including the probable subject of the crimes report to the DOJ. They do not leak and have never been credibly been accused of leaking. They do not confirm or deny information that is officially classified, no matter how obvious it is or how many years it has been in the public domain. They scrupulously continue to follow the classification restrictions that the CIA and the committee placed on them, no matter how absurd those restrictions are or how severe the crimes they conceal.

Nevertheless, the CIA searched their computer drives and their emails, and referred them to the DOJ for prosecution. Why? Because, in the course of an official Senate investigation into the torture program, they used a CIA-installed Google search tool to find CIA documents about the torture program. They read the documents, despite the fact that they contained a questionable stamp of “privilege,” and preserved them when they thought they were in danger of destruction. The staffers’ actions were not crimes or a security breach justifying a search of Senate computers. Their actions were oversight of an agency in sore need of it.

The CIA is a rogue agency, much like its counterparts, the FBI and NSA. It may be publicly embarrassed or wince at the criticism and condemnation thrown its way, but it ultimately answers to no one -- not even after its worst behavior has been exposed. It walks away from a damning report pretty much intact and has the gall to suggest Senate staffers be punished for walking in and out of its firesieve with damaging documents in their hands.

from the the-real-criminals-are-still-at-large dept

Guess who went to jail because of the CIA's long-running, illegal torture programs.

It wasn't former director Leon Panetta, who was ultimately responsible for the actions of his agency. It wasn't any number of agents, officials or supervisors who directly or indirectly participated in the ultimately useless torture of detainees. It wasn't the private contractors who profited from these horrendous acts committed in the name of "national security."

The single person to be put behind bars thanks to the CIA's torture programs was the man who blew the whistle on the agency's waterboarding: John Kiriakou. Now, he's finally free again (mostly), two months after the Torture Report that corroborates his allegations was released.

Kiriakou is serving out the remainder of his sentence for "revealing an undercover operative's identity" under house arrest. While still imprisoned, Kiriakou wondered aloud (in the Los Angeles Times) why Panetta wasn't facing similar charges, considering the former CIA head had disclosed far more sensitive information, including the names of SEAL operatives to a civilian -- the screenwriter for Zero Dark Thirty.

“It’s been a terrible three years, and it’s ruined me financially and personally, but in the greater picture it’s all been worth it,” John Kiriakou told Fusion over the phone from Arlington, Virginia, where he just began serving an 85-day house arrest sentence. It was his first interview since leaving a federal prison in Pennsylvania on Tuesday.

“I’m proud I had a role in seeing that torture is now banned in the United States,” he said.

The ultimate irony, he says, is that everything he was punished for saying has now been proven true. But this administration treats the unapproved dissemination of unflattering facts as criminal activity, rather than the check against government overreach it actually is. On the flipside, it allows officials like Panetta (and hundreds of unnamed ones granted anonymity by journalists) to "leak" classified information in order to push its preferred narrative.

Kiriakou's revelations should have prompted a deeper examination of the CIA, rather than a vindictive prosecution. Choosing this path -- one of the DOJ's favorites -- allowed the intelligence agency to expand and intensify its "enhanced interrogation" tactics.

[T]hat’s the problem with the torture program. Torture is a slippery slope, and once you start dehumanizing people, it’s almost a human tendency to do worse and worse and worse things to get the information you are supposed to be after,” Kiriakou said.

Imprisonment alone also dehumanizes people. Sometimes, the easiest way to throw someone's credibility into question is simply to press charges. Despite our justice system being advertised as "innocent until proven guilty," the perception among the general public tends to be that the accused is guilty until proven otherwise, or let off on a technicality. Prosecuting whistleblowers softens the impact of the exposed information, especially among those predisposed to granting the government more credibility than its citizens. The DOJ -- and the administration -- knows this, which is why this tactic has been pursued more often during the last seven years than in all the previous administrations combined.

CIA personnel -- and those overseeing them -- will see less time behind bars combined than John Kiriakou served on his own, because that's how supremely screwed up our government is at this point.

from the off-to-a-great-start dept

The new head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Richard Burr, has long been known as a staunch defender of anything the CIA/NSA decide to do. That's why we still find it odd that he's now in charge of overseeing them, a job that was created to try to prevent their abuses. In the past, Burr has even argued that all hearings by the committee should be held in secret, to prevent any information from ever getting out. So, perhaps it wasn't that surprising when he kicked off his new role by claiming that his predecessor, Senator Dianne Feinstein, had somehow broken all sorts of protocol in actually distributing copies of the committee's 6000+ page report on the CIA's torture program and how the CIA lied to Congress about it. Burr was demanding all the copies back, while supposedly acting furious that it had been distributed. He claimed that it "was not a valid disclosure" and that it was done without approval.

As part of that complaint, he went to the Senate Parliamentarian (basically the referee who makes the calls on all the arcane and sometimes ridiculous rules of the Senate), asking for a determination that Feinstein had violated the rules in distributing the report. Instead, he got the opposite. The Parliamentarian has noted that Feinstein did nothing wrong in distributing the report.

The Senate Parliamentarian has vindicated former Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein against charges that the California Democrat violated committee rules by sending the full, classified version of her panel’s torture report out to the executive branch.

The Justice Department said in a statement on Tuesday that its investigators had looked at the full version of the Senate Intelligence Committee report “and did not find any new information that they had not previously considered in reaching their determination,” adding that Mr. Durham’s “inquiry was extraordinarily thorough and we stand by our previously announced decision not to initiate criminal charges.”

"None of the defendant agencies have freely used the Full Report; they have kept it stored in a [sensitive compartmented information facility], with limited access," the government’s declaration reads. "Neither [the Department of Justice] nor [the Department of State], moreover, has even opened the package with the disc containing the full Report. And CIA and [the Department of Defense] have carefully limited access to and made only very limited use of the Report."

In both cases, the DOJ is justifying continued secrecy, but in only one case does it claim to be intimately familiar with the subject matter. So, which version of the DOJ's story is true? One would hope the declaration before the court would be the truthful statement, but you know what they say about "wishing with one hand." By the time you've worked your way through that process, your faith in the government dies a little more and you've defecated in your own hand -- neither of which are pleasant outcomes.

The only certainty here is that the DOJ will say whatever it wants to say in order to further its position. And that position is: shut up and stop asking. We're not going to let you see the full Torture Report. Another powerful blow against for government secrecy has been struck by the Most Transparent Administration in History. You may now continue your wholly sarcastic chants of "USA! USA! USA!"

from the i-guess-the-terrorists-did-win dept

Michael Hayden, the former CIA and NSA director, has revealed what most people already suspected -- to him, the Constitution is a document that he can rewrite based on his personal beliefs at any particular time, as noted by Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic. Specifically, he admits that after September 11th, 2001, he was able to totally reinterpret the 4th Amendment to mean something entirely different:

In a speech at Washington and Lee University, Michael Hayden, a former head of both the CIA and NSA, opined on signals intelligence under the Constitution, arguing that what the 4th Amendment forbids changed after September 11, 2001. He noted that "unreasonable search and seizure," is prohibited under the Constitution, but cast it as a living document, with "reasonableness" determined by "the totality of circumstances in which we find ourselves in history."

He explained that as the NSA's leader, tactics he found unreasonable on September 10, 2001 struck him as reasonable the next day, after roughly 3,000 were killed. "I actually started to do different things," he said. "And I didn't need to ask 'mother, may I' from the Congress or the president or anyone else. It was within my charter, but in terms of the mature judgment about what's reasonable and what's not reasonable, the death of 3,000 countrymen kind of took me in a direction over here, perfectly within my authority, but a different place than the one in which I was located before the attacks took place. So if we're going to draw this line I think we have to understand that it's kind of a movable feast here."

While it's true that the 4th Amendment does ban "unreasonable search and seizure," it seems like quite an interpretation to argue that "reasonableness" depends on what some third party does to us. That seems morally dangerous -- and it seems like a direct admission to terrorists that if they want to eviscerate the rights of Americans, they just need to keep on attacking, because folks like Hayden will just interpret it to mean that they should take away more and more rights from Americans.

Then there was this other rather stunning admission. Hayden admits that the NSA wants to listen to anyone it finds "interesting," not just those they think are doing something bad:

"I am not a law enforcement officer. I don't suspect anybody. I am simply going out there to retrieve information that helps keep my countrymen free and safe. This is not about guilt. In fact, let me be really clear. NSA doesn't just listen to bad people. NSA listens to interesting people. People who are communicating information."

This is a rather refreshing admission -- as most of those who normally defend the surveillance state like to pretend that they're only listening to "bad" people. They trot out the "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear" argument all the time. Even Hayden himself has argued along those lines in the past. Yet here he is, more accurately saying that "if you're boring, you have nothing to fear" but "if we think you're interesting, you should be very afraid." And "interesting" is subject to a lot more vague interpretations than "reasonableness."

You can see his whole speech below, and while it's nice that he's finally admitting how malleable his own morals are, it's depressing that he ever had the power to use his flexible morals to spy on all of us -- and then did so.

from the action,-reaction dept

We already wrote about how Senator Richard Burr has demanded that the White House return all copies of the full, unredacted CIA Torture Report, which Senator Dianne Feinstein distributed to various department heads last month. As we noted in our article, this seemed like an effort to stuff the full report down the memory hole to make sure that no one could ever do anything with it at all and to make it more difficult to access in a series of FOIA lawsuits. Those lawsuits are demanding the report, as well as the internal Panetta Review that is supposedly the smoking gun, involving an internal CIA analysis that mostly agrees with the Senate Intelligence Committee's analysis in the full report.

Reporter Jason Leopold of Vice News (and one of the people suing the government, under FOIA, for the documents) has some more details about Burr's action, including a copies of the letter [pdf] Burr sent the White House, and the letter that Feinstein sent in reply. As Leopold notes, Burr's decision seems specifically designed to try to do a legal two-step to make the document immune from FOIA lawsuits:

By advising the White House to cease entering the full torture report into an executive branch system of records, Burr is saying that the document is a "congressional record," which is exempt from FOIA, as opposed to an "agency record," which is subject to the provisions of the law.

Feinstein's response shows that she disagrees, and that the report can properly be handed over to the Executive Branch. The reason for the letter, obviously, is for it to be used in killing off the FOIA attempts, and the DOJ wasted no time in making just that argument:

Tonight, the government filed a response in our long-running lawsuit and asked a judge to dismiss our case. A CIA lawyer said in a 31-page declaration that the redactions in the executive summary were justified and the Panetta Review is properly classified and should not be released. The government also responded to the ACLU's FOIA lawsuit for the full torture report. The government said the full torture report is not an agency record subject to FOIA, it is a congressional record. The government cited Burr's letter to support its case.

Congress retains control over the Full Report for at least five reasons. First, the
conditions under which the report was created reflect that SSCI as a whole asserted complete
control over not only drafts, but also the final product. Second, throughout the years-long
process of creating and finalizing the Report, both SSCI and the CIA handled the Report in
accordance with SSCI’s instructions and strict limitations on access. Third, SSCI voted, in
accordance with Senate Rules, to seek declassification and release only of the Executive
Summary, Findings and Conclusions – not the Full Report. The then-SSCI Chairman’s decision
to provide the Full Report to certain Executive Branch agencies for nonpublic use does not
amount to a Committee decision to seek to declassify and release the Full Report. Fourth, the
current Chairman of SSCI has reiterated SSCI’s intent to retain control of the Full Report.
Finally, the defendant agencies have treated the Full Report, received in December 2014, as a
congressional record, sequestering it in secure storage space appropriate to its classification and
carefully limiting its dissemination and use. Because the Full Report remains a congressional
record as opposed to an agency record, this Court lacks jurisdiction over plaintiffs’ FOIA claim
seeking its release, and plaintiffs’ claim should be dismissed under Rule 12(h)(3) or 12(b)(1).2

This is not all that unexpected, even if it's fairly ridiculous. However, it's possible that the whole thing could backfire badly. Feinstein knew what she was doing in distributing the report to a number of people within the administration. While all of whom have access to it have the proper clearance, at least some have to agree that this report is an important historical document, detailing incredible misdeeds by the CIA -- and some of them may view it as important to have that information shared with the public to make sure such events never happen again.

Senator Burr's rather obvious move here to demand all copies be "returned" is seen by many as an attempt to bury the report entirely. As Senator Ron Wyden points out, returning the report would "aid defenders of torture who are seeking to cover up the facts and rewrite the historical record." Given that, it seems more likely that at least someone with access to the document is going to realize that this important review of history is at risk of being shredded. Hopefully there is someone in the government with the courage to stand up and get a copy out to reporters in some manner or another, before Burr has a chance to succeed in wiping it off the face of the earth.

from the so-they-can-be-burned dept

We had mentioned in the past, that once Senator Richard Burr took over the Senate Intelligence Committee, it seemed likely that the CIA torture report, prepared by the Committee's staffers, would be buried. That was before the redacted version of the executive summary was released, and it was written to explain why an agreement needed to be reached to release the report before the new Congress took over. However, what we didn't expect was that Senator Burr, upon taking office, would then take the rather unprecedented step of trying to bury the report anyway.

Burr, upon taking charge in January, wrote to the executive branch and the federal agencies in receipt of the document, and asked that it be returned to the committee, as he did not feel it was a valid disclosure.

“It gets pretty technical,” Burr said, confirming he sent the letter. The full document, he explained, had been voted complete in the 112th Congress, and the release of the executive summary was voted on by the 113th Congress.

But what wasn’t ever agreed upon, said Burr, was the disclosure of the full report to several arms of the federal government, which prompted his letter demanding all copies be returned.

And, that's not all he's asking for. He's also demanding back the so-called "Panetta Review," which was the internal review, done by the CIA of the torture program, with findings that largely mirrored the Senate Intelligence Committee's report. The Panetta Review had been done, on the orders of then director Leon Panetta, and the CIA insists it was only meant for internal use at the CIA. At some point, however, according to the Intelligence Committee staffers, the CIA gave a draft of that document over to the those staffers. That resulted in then Senator Mark Udall asking the CIA for the final review -- leading the CIA to freak out that a Senator knew of the existence of the Panetta Review in the first place.

That, of course, resulted in the CIA then spying on the Senate staffers' computers to find out how they got the document and the CIA ridiculously claiming that the staffers had violated criminal laws in removing the document from the network and storing it in a safe place. Udall, before leaving Congress, argued that the Panetta Review should be released, but Burr has (not surprisingly) demanded the document back.

Once again, this raises some serious questions about what Senator Burr thinks his role is. Is it oversight of the CIA -- or is he the CIA's protector? Because the demands for both of these reports to be "returned" so that he can more or less destroy them, certainly suggests the latter, rather than the former.

And, as ridiculous as it may sound to demand the return of these reports, it's more than just a gesture of solidarity with the CIA. The ACLU is currently suing the CIA over its refusal to release the Panetta Review under a FOIA request and also the federal government for refusing to release the full CIA torture report. Having that information in other parts of the government make it more likely that a court could order it to be turned over. But Burr seems to be focused on making sure that it's only held by "friendly" parties who might destroy this important historical document, detailing the CIA's abuses. As the ACLU noted in a statement:

“Senator Burr is supposed to be overseeing the CIA, not covering up its crimes. The full Senate torture report was given to Executive Branch agencies to be widely used to make sure that the federal government learns its lesson and never uses torture again. Senator Burr’s attempt to recall the report seems like a bid to thwart Congress’s own Freedom of Information Act, which protects the rights of the American people to learn about their own government. Americans should ask, if Senator Burr isn’t going to serve his role in the Constitution’s system of checks and balances, then why did he want to be chairman of the intelligence committee? This is a poor start to a chairmanship.”